


The Hungry Place

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, Ancient Egyptian Literature & Mythology, Arapaho Mythology, Assorted Native American Mythology, Cannibalism, Gen, Irish Mythology - Freeform, Iroquois Mythology, Islamic Mythology, M/M, Man-Eating, Wendigo, a bit of Judaism because Len, maori mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 13:41:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10663809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: Central City was built unwisely on a place where people don't dare to die for fear that they will come back - different.Hungry.Leonard Snart makes just that mistake.





	The Hungry Place

**Author's Note:**

> Please ignore my rampant bastardization of the dozen or so different mythologies I looked up to write this fic. 
> 
> Coldwave Creature AU Bingo - Wendigo Square

There is a place between the plains and the mountains that is a chasm of winter, a nature-made trap designed to ensnare unwary men, a place where creatures not of this earth emerge from the shells which held them.

A place of hunger.

The peoples around the area spoke of it in hushed voices, and forbade their children to ever venture there, no matter how tempting the hunt. It was a place where men died, women died, children died, though there are many such places; from this place, though, some who die do not stay dead, but are born again, children of the winter frost, children of the White Owl. And such children may take the form of men, but they are no such thing; their teeth are sharp and their hunger un-ending, and the antlers of the stag rise up from their foreheads so as better to gore the flesh of mankind, their rightful prey. And so when the peoples of the area found a winterborn peering out from the eyes of a man, they banished him from their camps.

And then came the others, who listened not at all to the old stories and trusted instead to their steel and their powder and their books, and they, too, fell within the trap, and the winterborn brought terror upon the land. 

But such triumphs pass, even for the winterborn. Each new wave of men disbelieved the warnings of the prior age, but they brought with them weapons far sharper than steel.

They brought roads, and they brought houses, and they brought shipments of grain so that fewer and fewer went hungry. Fewer men fell into the trap from which few emerged and no man survived. The winterborn howled and roared, but for each man that fell prey to their teeth and their antlers, there were endless more, hungry for land instead of food.

Fewer and fewer were born in the jaws of winter, until the men stood proudly upon the hungry place, nature's trap, unnature's make, and declared the old stories nothing more than foolishness.

The winterborn may no longer reign in their place of power, but the hungry place never forgot them. Those who settled and tamed the hungry place were never satisfied, want and envy gnawing at their insides, turning them against each other with the blood-thirst of their ancestors.

And when the war came, the place on the edge of what men called Kansas bled a flood greater than the whole country. Neighbor turned on neighbor, brother on brother, sister upon sister, parents upon children, children upon any they could. 

And the hungry place drank their hate, their violence, their blood with glee.

Even when the war passed and the buildings grew, the people did not leave. The lure of the nearby river was too great to resist, even as the stench of death laid over the place.

The slaughterhouses cause it, the people said, and the slaughterhouses were banned.

The chemicals on the fields cause it, the people said, and the chemicals were banned.

The lead in the walls causes it, the people said, and the lead was banned.

But those who lived in the hungry place would never be satisfied, the shadows of the winterborn heavy upon the place. And so the people threw up their hands and gave up, and left the place if they could. 

Those that could not leave, stayed, and grew cruel with their want. 

But the winterborn come from hunger, not cruelty, and the people who had left continued to send food to those they had abandoned, and so no winterborn walked the paths of the hungry place.

Until -

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard Snart was not born cruel, though cruelty haunted his footsteps like a dog his master. 

He was born in the center of the hungry place, in a home small and cramped and unhappy. He opened his eyes and saw cruelty around him, and he became cruel, too, in response. Such is the nature of the hungry place, where no one escapes unscathed. But he remembered how to love in that place that hates love, for it remembers those _it_ loved, long ago, the long-departed winterborn, and it was that love that was his undoing. 

Leonard Snart was clever, and he could have been good even in his cruelty, but he was unlucky.

His father hurt him, and his mother left him, and his little sister whom he loved feared him even as she loved him in return. He took her to his grandfather’s home, across the way, and he left her there when there was trouble, and he would walk home on shoes that fell from his feet.

There was little money at home, and little at school, but the ways of the people would still have been enough to feed Leonard Snart if not for his love for his sister. He took the food at the school and gave it to her, citing her tender age; he did not want her to suffer the shrunken belly and the pangs that wracked him. His father took the money at home and spent it on heady liquors, citing his advanced age; he did not hit Leonard when he was too drunk to move, and so Leonard did not protest.

And so he starved in the midst of plenty.

The winter took notice.

There are many who starve, but few who have the spark that draws a man to the hungry place, a place he knows he should not go: Leonard Snart knew these things but did not care, for he was as loyal to the soil that birthed him as to his mother. It was not the same as coming willingly, but to stay willingly when all encourage leaving is very nearly close enough. 

And so the winter brought its storms, pulled out its traps, its sharp-toothed wind, its streaming hail, its rains that turn to treacherous ice. 

The people said it was the worst winter in living memory, and many that winter shivered from other things than cold. 

It was in one of these storms that the winter caught its prey at last.

Leonard had gone to his grandfather’s house to give his sister what money he could spare, hiding his slenderness in his over-large layers, laughing at his grandfather’s sad questions, and he was returning when the great storm came upon him all in a sudden.

He fell to his knees, cut by the wind, pushed over by the snow, unable to struggle his way up.

“ _No_ ,” he gasped.

Dozens had already died this year from the winter’s rage, frozen and starved beneath the ice.

The winter pulled back its layers, revealing one such man – a man without a home, who had unwisely slept in the streets and so had died upon them – and waited. 

The winterborn are cursed by their own actions. The winter can do no more than offer. 

All men who are trapped by the hungry place die.

But some – 

Some still emerge from its depths.

Leonard ripped first the clothing from the corpse, covering himself in layers of cloth and snow, but still the winter froze him deep in his heart.

It waited. 

Leonard gnawed on his own fingers to keep them from freezing, wailing as his own hot blood filled his mouth. 

It _waited_.

The gnawing need filled Leonard’s belly, and he looked upon the man and he thought – food will make me warm, but I have no food but – 

I cannot.

I _must_.

He did not permit himself to shed tears that would freeze onto his face, even when he reached forward, his fingers frozen in blood and ice into sharp talons.

He _ate_ – 

– and he was warm.

The winter roared in pleasure.

_A winterborn is come at last._

And the people of what they called Central City all shook in terror that night – and did not know why.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard takes the nail file and rubs furiously at the small stumps that grow from his forehead, desperate to hide the truth of his actions. There are no legends of the winterborn anymore, and no peoples to cast him out from the realms of men, but Leonard knows well enough that those who look different are not beloved by the race of men.

His best efforts fail him and he flees his home at last, taking refuge in an ancient church by the graveyard. 

The priest casts him out when he will not pray, but the parson is new to the city and less accustomed to her everyday cruelties, and permits Leonard to sleep at his hearth.

“Why will you not pray?” he asks.

“It is not my god,” Leonard tells him, and tells him in truth.

When the house-cleaner comes, she makes a sign against evil against him.

“Don’t be like that,” the parson says with a laugh. “He’s just a lost boy, looking for aid.” He does not mention the horns that grow from the boy's skull. 

“He’s a devil,” the house-cleaner says, for her people might have lost the words to those that took their land but they remember well their stories. “He’s cursed.”

Leonard says nothing. He knows it is true.

“We will have a long winter,” she says, and thinks for a moment about refusing to return, but her family needs the money and so she stays.

One day, some weeks later, a hand as cold as ice falls upon her shoulder. 

She looks up and sees something look down upon her, and it is not human.

Its teeth are very sharp.

“You will kill me,” she says, resigned. 

“No,” says the creature who was once Leonard and still is. “But I would like to know who gave you the bruise that covers your arm.”

She reaches her hand up in an aborted movement, an attempt to hide what she has never permitted to go without cloth to cover it, but the eyes of the winterborn are keener than the eyes of man. 

“He means well,” she says, but her voice trembles. 

“No,” the winterborn says. “He doesn’t. Give me a name, Clarinda.”

She shudders, she who told the parson her name was Clair and never uttered anything different, but the will of the winterborn masters that of mere men. She whispers an apology to the gods of her grandmother in a tongue she had almost forgotten, and she tells him the name.

The winterborn goes out, barefoot and lightly clad despite the roaring wind, and she stays upon the floor and she shivers and she shivers and she shivers.

What returns, its mouth wet and black with dried blood, its eyes shining blue in the light, its antlers full-grown at last, twisting and curling up to the ceiling, is glorious and awful.

“Go home, Clarinda,” the winterborn says gently. “He will trouble you no more.”

“Forgive me,” she says, and she does not know to whom she says it: to her god, the Christian god; to her grandmother’s gods, to whom she did not listen; to her lover, whom she betrayed; to the young man who once was before her, who succumbed to his true nature on her behalf. 

He smiles a terrible smile.

“They will come for you,” she tells him, even as she wipes away the tears that stream down her face. “The people will come for you.”

“The people,” he says, “may _try_.”

And the winterborn does what winterborn before him have done and folds himself back up into the space that once held a man until all that can be seen is a man once more. 

The people who once were would still have seen the monster that lurks behind his eyes.

But those people are gone, and the new men of steel and book, the men of the houses and the roads, who know only the hunger of their souls and not the hunger of their bodies – they do not know.

Clarinda flees. She does not go home. She goes to her grandmother’s place and throws herself upon the rug and she says, “He is come.”

“Who?” her grandmother asks, surprised. 

“The devil,” Clarinda says, her arms wrapped around herself. “The son of the Owl.”

“Clarinda,” her grandmother starts, and there is doubt in her voice.

Clarinda pulls away her dress and shows her grandmother where the winterborn placed his hand.

There is no mark, no bruise, no pain.

There is only the light dusting of frost that sparkles in the light, in the shape of a hand whose fingers stretch into talons.

The grandmother whispers a prayer.

Clarinda closes her eyes and joins her.

When they have finished, the frost is gone as though it had never been.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leonard is always warm, now; the cold is as sweet to him as a newlywed, caressing his shoulders and arms, pressing kisses to his cheeks, but it has no dominion over him.

The power of the winterborn is not in the cold that births them. It is in the hunger that consumes them.  
Leonard steals after the murderers and pimps of Central, silent as a shadow, and he grows fat upon their flesh, their bones, their organs that he stuffs into his mouth and gorges his endless hunger upon. His skin is sleek, his smile charming, his face beautiful, his eyes cold.

But he is still Leonard.

He still returns to his grandfather's house, to care for his sister whom he loves.

He still returns to his father's house, bringing money in supplication, though his father never again dares raise a hand to him, seeing though not understanding that some change has happened to make his son into a man he does not recognize. 

When he finds a man - little more than a boy, really - standing amidst the flames that consume his house, speaking of beauty and howling his pain to the stars, his first thought is –

Well, his first thought is 'I've never had barbeque before,' for his sense of humor is as black as the snow that cloaks him is white.

But after that, he pauses, and he wonders.

He walks into the flames, which die when they beat upon his icy flesh.

"Are you a man?" he asks. "Or something like me?"

"I am a devil," the man responds.

Leonard considers this. 

The winter whispers encouragement, a murmur of wind in his ears. It knows many things that men have forgotten, and the Owl knows his opposite, that great bird of the plains who some peoples worshiped as a god and others respected as an elder brother.

Leonard does not know these things, but he reaches out his hands with a smile.

"I am a monster," he tells the man. "Would you come with me?"

The man looks upon him. 

Leonard says no more.

Men are cursed by their own actions.

"Yes," the man says, and steps forward to meet his fate.

They go side by side, monsters both, the angel and the devil, the devil and the angel, and only the wisest of the people know that there is no difference between the two.

The winterborn feasts upon the flesh of those who harm others, the endless pit of its hunger ever beckoning. The summerborn burns all around him with the fire that bubbles over within him, the flame that rages in his heart never quieted.

On the midsummer after they met, they go out to the plains where they have never been before, and the winterborn shows the summerborn how to unfold himself from the confines of the merely human, and the summerborn flies upon wings of thunder and lightning. 

When he lands, he shines so bright that he would blind all men that look upon him.

But the winterborn is no man.

He steps forward, drawn to his opposite, and they press their lips to each other without even realizing that they were moving. 

When they pull apart, some part of the summerborn's light is gone, and some part of the winterborn's hunger is sated.

"My name is Mick Rory," the summerborn says, his voice filled with wonder. "I had forgotten."

"My name is Leonard Snart," the winterborn says, and blinks. "I have not visited my sister in a year."

"The winter will take every part of you it can," Mick says. "Just like the sun will burn me to ashes."

Leonard smiles his terrible smile. "It's a good thing I have you, then, and you me."

Mick smiles, and his smile is no less terrible. "Yes," he says. "Good thing."

They go hand in hand from the plain, back to the city.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The bird that fills Mick's breath with flame is far more forthcoming than the winter that whispers in Leonard's ears, and Mick tells him the stories of their kind. 

His hands and legs move in the ancient dances that he never learned, though his mother was the right people for it.

"My father came across the sea," he tells Leonard, who swallows the stories as avidly as he swallows everything else. "His was the land of courts and revelry and treachery. Ours is the land of warriors, of tricksters, of travelers, and my mother was born here."

"My father's blood came from a land of the forests and the beasts," Leonard says. "The stone and the tree. My mother -" He pauses.

"Yes?"

"My mother had no God but one," Leonard says. "And her people were welcome in no land. The people of the Word, and the Covenant. And I will follow her god, Owl or no Owl."

"You need not worship your patron for him to love you," Mick assures him. "It has been so long since winter has borne fruit; it has discarded such concerns long ago, if it ever had them."

"Worship is the concern of men," Leonard says. “Not of creatures like us.”

A winterborn’s hunger is never sated. No blood, no story, no adventure can fill the pit in their stomach.

And so Leonard goes forth to seek what he will, though he always returns to the land which he loves. 

His sister clings to him. “I don’t understand,” she says, blind hands feeling the antlers that Leonard only sometimes permits to show. “What…?”

“The people who came from the north and the east call his kind _wendigo_ ,” Mick says. “Across the world, they call them _rakshasa_ –”

“Winter is winter,” Leonard says, “even if it’s too hot to notice it. By our standards, at any rate; the _rakshasa_ are a hot-blooded lot.”

Mick rolls his eyes. “But those who lived here,” he says, “call them the winterborn.”

“And you –” she pauses, swallows. “You eat people?”

“Yes,” Leonard says. “They are my rightful prey.” 

Her eyes are bright with tears. “Do you at least only go after the bad people?”

“People are not good or bad,” he tells her, gentle. “They are people. They may contain multitudes. But they are my prey, for better or worse.”

She sobs.

He pets her gently. “Yes, my Lisa,” he tells her. “I devour those who harm others.”

His hands drift over to her arm and the still-healing cut there, from a bottle thrown with intent.

She freezes. “No,” she says. “ _No_ , Lenny. He is your _father_.”

Leonard arches his eyebrows. “I was born of winter.”

“If he is not your father, then I am not your sister,” she says stubbornly. “He is your father.”

“Very well,” he says. “I will not devour him. Can I have Mick burn him, instead?”

“No!” she exclaims.

“Why not?”

“Only if he does something unforgivable,” she tells him.

“I will wait,” Leonard tells her. “But it will only be a matter of time.”

It is.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When she comes from over the ocean, mad-eyed and half-blind as she ever was, the bird of the plains tells Mick, who tells Leonard, who sighs and goes to greet her.

She greets him at her doorway.

“You did not have much luck at this the last time,” he says, nodding at the mortal man who remains inside the house they had purchased together. “Why do you think it will be better this time?”

“I am not my ancestor,” she says primly. “I didn’t pick him based on a name. We are in love.”

“You are the daughter of lightning,” Leonard says. “Mistress of the thunder. Does your husband know?”

“No,” she says, and wraps her arms around herself. “He does not. He came to my land to attend at a hospital; we met there. He does not know the stories of my land. He does not know what happens to those who have been marked by the lightning, as I was.” Her eyes narrow. “Does yours?”

Leonard smiles a smile with teeth. “My husband is the bird of the plains. He does not feast upon flesh, as we do; but he burns those who escape justice, though that may not be what men consider justice.” The smile widens. “Have you ever had barbeque?”

She laughs and slaps her hands over her mouth. “You are terrible,” she says. “I like you, cousin-mine. What is your name?”

“Leonard Snart,” he tells her.

“My name,” she says, “is Nora Allen.”

Her husband, Henry Allen, is one of the many peoples of the city, which he loves; he greets Leonard with surprise, saying he did not know that his wife had kin in the city.

Leonard only smiles.

He introduces Nora and Mick: they bristle at each other, lightning and fire of different sorts, territorial masters of the skies seeing an invader to their land. Leonard rolls his eyes and tells them to grow up and learn to share.

Mick looks at Nora. Nora looks at Mick.

“I can’t wait until another winterborn is made,” she says.

“The ranting, the raving,” Mick agrees. “We’ll remind him of this moment.”

“Your baby is cute,” Leonard says, dangling little Barry on his knee. “Can I eat him?”

“No,” Nora says. “I would have him take after his father, a mortal man among mortal men.”

“Then you shouldn’t have borne him in the hungry place,” Leonard tells her.

She shrugs. “No lightning has hit him yet.”

Leonard shrugs and offers the baby a finger.

The baby grabs it and crunches down on the meat, gobbling it up with delight.

Leonard – whose finger it had not been – looks at Nora. “Are you sure?”

She sighs. 

The crackling lightning that dances over the water does not answer her.

The bird of the plains merely shrugs when Mick asks.

Leonard waits until winter, walks out into the cold, the winds roaring around him as they embrace their beloved child. “What creature is he,” he asks, “that is born, not made?”

The wind whistles innocently in his ear.

“He is born of the hungry place,” Leonard says. “Like me. But that is not enough, or we would have far more of me.”

The whistling grows louder, and louder, until no man can see or hear anything else.

A winterborn is no man.

Leonard comes back inside. 

“Well?” Nora demands. 

“Congrats,” he says. “Your child has eaten of the huckleberry.”

“The _garden_?” Nora groans. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”

“It grows everywhere in the hungry place,” Leonard tells her. “The land wants its people back – and your blood is already tainted, thunder-goddess.”

“Oh, hush,” she says. “It probably has more to do with you feeding him fingers. Now, tell me more. The Māori have no stories about this bush.”

Leonard shrugs. The winter is the wisest of the elders, but it is rarely the most eloquent. 

Mick lights a flame. “Your child has no name,” he reports. “Had he eaten of the berry and then of the flesh, he would be a giant; if he trod upon the water, he would be a serpent. But he is the son of the thunder, so these are things he cannot be.”

“So what _is_ he?” she complains.

“An eater of men,” Leonard says dryly. “Do you need to know more?”

“I would know if I ought to expect him to have antlers, like you, or blindness, like me, or winged arms, like Mick. One must take care to child-proof a house, you know.”

Leonard laughs.

A small child, not far away, runs home crying.

“Mick?” he asks.

“Yes,” Mick says. “He is of the in-between, born of thunder, bred of berries, child of the hungry place. There is lightning in his future – and a changeblood until then, the son of the Owl in the spring.”

“Spring,” Leonard says, surprised. “Birth and renewal – those are not our elements. A mixture of summer and winter more often gives rise to autumn than to spring.”

“No,” Mick says. “But you have managed it, Nora. A monster of the spring.”

“You will have to help me care for him,” she says, “when I return to the sky. He will be too young.” She caresses her child. “They are always too young.”

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Little Barry is a happy child, his mother’s friends teaching him how to hide the ram’s horns that curl over his forehead, how to preen the speckling of owl feathers on his arms. His mother feeds him well, his own special snacks made just for him. 

Sparks of light trail his heels when he runs. 

The lightning comes when he is eleven, but it does not strike him but his mother, and she returns to the sky. 

“You go too soon,” Leonard tells her.

“I think my husband may be going to jail,” she replies, irritated. “And he has left a policeman to guard our child.”

“That is unfortunate,” Mick says. “A policeman will not let us come near.”

“Indeed,” she says. “Yet I wished for him to grow up a man as well as a monster; perhaps some time without your aid and presence will not be so bad. He will still remember you when he grows older. When the lightning strikes him, you must go to him.”

“We will,” Leonard says.

“Tell him to seek me among the skies,” she says, and goes.

“We will,” Mick says, one sky-lord to another. 

The wind blows warm over their arms, approving.

Nora’s words prove true: the policeman will not have criminals visiting his house, and so they retreat. Barry forgets what he has learned and grows his next ten years as a man, eating mortal food and finding it lacking for reasons he cannot say.

The lightning comes at the quarter-century, and it comes in strength.

“An explosion,” Mick says. “An _explosion_. Overcompensating, is he?”

“That’s not nice,” Leonard says. “Nor appropriate – I’ve seen you explode things.”

Mick waves a hand, dismissing the argument. “I,” says he, “have _style_.”

They investigate.

Walls are no match for a monster.

“The lightning struck him separately,” Mick observes. “Nothing to do with the explosion.”

“The explosion was meant to bring forth monsters,” Leonard says, frowning. “A monster made by man, not nature – they will be weak things, unworthy things.”

The hungry place agrees, rumbling its disdain in the wind, in the ground, in the water. 

The city becomes crueler yet, dissatisfaction seeping into each household. 

“We will wait until he wakes,” Leonard decides.

Barry awakens, and sees, and runs.

He runs to _them_.

Lightning trails his heels, the sparks of his youth matured at last.

“My uncles,” he greets them.

“Your friends,” Leonard says. “Won’t you stay for dinner?”

“I have been so hungry,” Barry says. “Caitlin – my friend – says that it is merely my metabolism, increased.”

“It isn’t,” Mick says.

“I know,” Barry says. “Cisco – my friend – has created a cold gun, a heat gun. Would you like them?”

“Why not?” Leonard asks, amused. “If you paint yourself a hero, we will play the enemy.”

“Harder to find what’s so easy to see,” Mick agrees.

“Why _are_ you playing the hero?” Leonard asks. “A time will come when the justice of nature – the justice of _your_ nature – will not match the ideals of men, and men will fall before you.”

“Harrison Wells has encouraged me to,” Barry says.

“Your friend?” Mick asks.

“No,” Barry says. “He is no mortal man, but he hides his face even from me, his kin. I know not what he is. I have asked the skies and the lightning, but they do not respond.”

Mick asks the bird of the plains, but he is silent.

Leonard waits until winter, and goes to the cold. “What is he, that births monsters?” he asks.

The winter wraps his arms around its true-born child and whispers.

“Well?” Barry says. “What _is_ he?”

Leonard smiles, terrible, and two dozen babes in the nearby houses all begin to scream, and cannot be consoled.

“He is,” Leonard says, “an enemy.”

“An enemy?”

“He has made himself a serpent,” Leonard says. “He has trod upon the water , but feasted on no flesh– instead, he seeks the lightning to claim as his own.”

“A serpent who is trying to be a lightning?” Barry says dubiously. “That sounds wrong.”

Mick laughs. “It is,” he says, and his smile shines so bright that two dozen stoves catch fire, all at once. “He is the enemy, the horned serpent, that which some people call _unktehila_ ; he is my rightful prey – and yours.”

And at that Barry smiles, and at his smile two dozen houses go dark, the electrical grid that powers them surging like the floodwaters until they have burnt brightly and quickly but no more. 

“I will hunt him,” Barry says. “I will have him.”

“Excellent,” Leonard says. “Mick will set up the barbeque.”

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The serpent who calls himself Harrison Wells, whose name at birth was Eobard Thawne, has created many plots, many plans; he thinks himself a genius who rightfully reigns because he knows the future from which he has come. He does not understand why his man-made lightning pales before that which came from the gods, and so he ran across the water of Time to seek his prey when his prey was young.

It was he who brought the lightning to take away Nora.

“Well,” Barry says. “That was rude. Now I must go all the way to the sky if I am to find her.”

The serpent knows the toys of ice and heat that Barry had smuggled to Leonard and Mick, and laughs in their face.

“You cannot face me,” he crows. “I have the speed of lightning.”

“So do I,” Barry says, appearing.

“You!” the serpent hisses. “How?”

“The eyes of the lightning are sharper than the eyes of man,” Barry says. “And so sharper your eyes would be, if you were to feast upon the flesh you have been given right to.”

“Flesh?”

“Men,” Barry clarifies. “You are a horned serpent, as I am a horned bird. You are meant to eat men.”

“I will not,” the serpent hisses, disgusted. “I will _never_.”

“Then you are a man? Not a serpent?”

“I am,” the serpent says, which is a lie: once made, never unmade. He has trod through the waters of Time, and so he is a serpent born – albeit a hungry one. 

And a serpent is the rightful prey of the birds of the sky: the owl of winter, the bird of summer. 

Leonard, too, is the son of the Owl, child of winter, but his blood is of the land, not the sky; this is not his battle – but he will enjoy watching.

Each of them smiles his terrible smile.

“No – _no_!” the serpent cries, seeing first Leonard’s icy talons, the antlers that stand proud from his brow; the story of the _wendigo_ is famed and has spread down the centuries. He knows what he sees.

Then he sees the birds, Mick in his glory, shining as bright as the sun, thunder in his wings; Barry, the quick-dark of lightning, his own wings spread silent and deadly. 

And the serpent flees before them.

“Good,” Mick says, his voice echoing in the thunder. “A chase.”

“Yes,” Barry says.

And they go.

Leonard sets the table.

“There will be others,” he says, when they have eaten. “Like, I have found, calls to like.”

“Man-made monsters are better than none,” Mick agrees. “Provided they know their place.”

Most of the new men – the people call them meta-humans – follow Leonard and Mick. Some stay with Barry. They do not require the flesh of men, but they do not understand why they hunger for more than their old lives provided. The drama, the attention, the battles – that sates them.

Leonard and Mick and Barry are sated by –

Other things. 

Leonard hunts those who cause harm.

Mick hunts those who are unjust. 

Barry – 

Barry hunts all who prey upon the good. 

The hungry place throws open its arms and summons its children home, and so there are more battles, more fights, more strange things.

Barry climbs the pathway to the sky, leaping up to close a black hole, grasping the parent vine and crawling his way into the heavens.

Nora embraces him and sends him home with a book of recipes that Mick adopts with glee.

A giant from another world, who runs like lightning and devours all in his path, threatens them, wanting to rule the place that calls him, though he knows not why.

Leonard swallows him, piece by piece.

There is a man that flies through time and asks for their aid.

His ship comes over the water, safe and snug, and he calls upon the many creatures of the time. He seeks the every-living hawks, who hail from the sea of sand and awaken in the same form in each lifetime, and he seeks others, too, that support them.

He calls for Mick and for Len; he summons them by their human names, all unknowing of that which looks out from behind their eyes. 

Mick laughs.

Leonard hums, intrigued.

“We have no need to go,” Mick says.

“We have no reason not to,” Len says.

The winterborn are never satisfied. They are always hungry.

Mick acknowledges this.

Barry rolls his eyes. “You’re both crazy, my uncles,” he tells them. “Go and tell me how it was – and I will fetch you back myself, if need be.”

They go.

They hunt through time, their teeth sharp, their fingers clawed; their teammates are repulsed by them and fear them. 

They go to the land of fjord, where the monster they seek – the dog-faced, sharp-eared which the peoples of his land call _set_ when they see them, bound up in an endless chase with the hawks he hunted in life. A dog who has caught his tail and yet must keep chasing, forever.

They travel to the land of the snow, where Len gets distracted by a _rusalka_ and Mick is thrown into a prison, which makes him laugh and shine like a light to show Len where to find him. 

When Len finds him, he’s in the same cell as their colleague from aboard the Waverider. 

“Must we rescue him?” Len grumbles even as he hefts the man onto his shoulders.

“He did me a favor,” Mick says, and that is the end of it.

Monsters well understand the concept of debt.

And then they go forward in time.

“Let me go here,” Mick cries when he finds the land of fire and strife, shining far too bright and far too terrible. “And I will be the king of the sun!”

“We must return,” Leonard reminds him, and takes him back, snarling with madness the whole way.

“I must go,” Mick growls after he has been trapped upon the steel ship for a week too long. “At least for some time. I cannot be here.”

“Home?” Leonard asks.

“No,” Mick says, and tells Leonard his plan.

Leonard laughs.

He drops Mick off in a land of forest, stone and tree, and the far-children of the Good Gentleman come to fetch him in hopes of using him. The Good Gentlemen yet reign supreme beneath their Hills in the land of the green, and they leave their changeling children scatter in cots throughout their lands. These children have grown, but not well: their future brothers steal them from the past, hunting down each one, and sometimes taking the unchanged ,too, such as the man who flies the ship. 

These far-children are nothing like their mighty, capricious sires. They have forgotten their roots, far in the future; they do not understand their hungers, their isolation, their haughtiness, and assume it natural. 

They do not eat of the flesh of man, and are weakened thereby. 

A year and a day, Mick passes in their company, hungering for the sun. 

A year and a day, Mick is burned from the inside by the heat.

A year and a day, and he returns to Leonard and feels the balm and chill of Leonard’s hands upon his heart.

“They will taste good,” Mick tells Leonard, content.

“Yes,” Leonard says. He tells Mick of the rock that was flung from Orion’s sling onto the earth and how the set they hunted used it to create false-hawks from the others. Jax had been adjusted by the serpent to be a man-made monster, an _ifrit_ of flame; Leonard disapproved of the mixing and is pleased that Jax has been restored to his former self.

“And you complain about me being too fond,” Mick says, shaking his head.

“I would still eat him,” Len sniffs.

They travel forward to the future, where their ship’s captain fails so utterly at murder that Mick and Leonard can do nothing but exchanged looks of horror.

They travel back to the past, where the man with the scarred face tips his hat to them and tells them that the winterborn should not stay too long or the people would find him, and he would be expelled.

Mick points out that he is just as dangerous, puffing with irritation.

“The people here,” the man from the past says with a sigh, “fear the bite of winter far more than the heat of summer.”

“This is true no matter where we go,” Leonard says, and obligingly hangs back to avoid causing any fuss.

The far-children of the Good Gentlemen send their armies against them.

“Enough of this running,” Leonard says, looking down at the infant that was himself, once, in puzzlement. He does not recognize himself in this human form. “We should take the fight to them.”

They go to the future, instead, and find a giant.

A _mechanical_ giant.

“What will they think of next,” Mick murmurs. 

At last, they capture the _set_ – but the humans aboard the ship, and the hawk-woman too who ought to know better , do not kill him immediately. They do not banish him to starvation. They hold him captive and seek to trade him to the far-children of the Good Gentlemen.

Leonard and Mick exchange glances.

It will not go well, but it matters little to them: their prey is everywhere. 

“We will finish this,” Leonard declares, “and we will return. I have had enough of this jaunt.”

“Yes,” Mick says. “To our home.”

“To the hungry place,” Leonard says, and is pleased.

But when they go under the hill to find the Vanishing Point, they find a glowing figure, bound in place by the strands of time, shining with the light of the skies.

A _familiar_ figure.

“Nora Allen,” Leonard says, exasperated. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

“Blame Barry,” she says. “He keeps visiting the past to see me die.”

“Why? For pleasure?”

“I think he’s trying to find a time when I do not die,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He creates a knot in which I am trapped, and the far-children of the Good Gentlemen found me and took me to their home under the hill. I have been trapped for a very long time, my friends; I would be released.”

“I will do it,” Mick says, but he still burns too bright. His flames would free her, it is true, but he would drown in the flood that would be created when they are unleashed.

“No,” Leonard says. “Let me.”

Mick returns to the ship.

Leonard looks upon the threads of destiny.

“You wouldn’t dare!” one of the far-children cry. “It will kill us all!”

They think him still a man, despite all that they have seen him do. 

Leonard smiles, and it is a terrible smile, and the children all pull back before it.

And Leonard Snart, child of the hungry place, opens his mouth and _eats_.

A winterborn’s hunger is never sated.

No blood, no story, no adventure can fill their empty stomach.

Time does no more to sate him.

He eats and he eats and he eats.

And what he eats he gives back to his home, the hungry place, and it reaches out its hands to its people.

Barry looks up from where he runs, and smiles. 

Mick looks from where he sails, and smiles.

The meta-humans look up from where they are, and they smile, though they know not why.

Mick returns home.

With Barry by his side, he goes to standing stones that rest in the park in the center of the city.

Leonard emerges from the standing stones, Nora by his side.

“Mother!” Barry cries gleefully, and embraces her.

“My friend,” Mick says to Leonard. “What have you done?”

“I have created the hungry place,” says Leonard. “Far back in the past, far forward in the future.”

He smiles once more.

“But for us, I have created for us an age of heroes and of villains.”

His smile widens.

“And they will all be _hungry_.”


End file.
